60
PARTISAN REVIEW
The earlier volume is cheerful and naive. Edmund Wilson has said
that it is written in the style of Conrad. But the significance of the remark
is that Malraux has been fooced to romanticize a situation he has not yet
been able fully to grasp. He has taken it in the large, on the side of the
picturesque, precisely because he is not yet qualified to take it otherwise.
But beneath is an immense curiosity which predicts the clarity and dis–
crimination of the later work:
Les COllquerants
is a diary af Malraux's
first contacts with China. It is an honest but only a preliminary docu–
ment, written before its author was able to digest the philosophical and
the formal implications of his material.
If
he sympathizes with the rising
revolt, it is for two reasons: that drama and spectacle are on the side of
the revolutionists, and that since their revolt is directed principally against
the British imperialists in Honkong, French imperialist interests are for
the time being on their side also.
If
Malraux pushes on into open sym–
pathy with the Chinese Communists, it is that 'he has brought from France
a disillusioning knowledge of the graft and duplicity of French politics
and business interests, quite as much as that he is young, adventurous,
and has friends who are involved already in Chinese Communism for the
same reasons. The consequence is that there is a distinct confusion in the
book. The Communism of his French characters, uncertain as yet of its
philosophical basis, is tinctured with the soldier of fortune attitude, and in
consequence has not yet supplanted a strong sense of French nationalism.
Neither the reader nor M . Malraux is quite sure of the actual motives
of many of his characters. It is not quite made clear that the methods
of French business firms in Indo-China are the same as those of the British
imperialists hated by French and Chinese alike. He is candid in presenting
the fact of their machinations, their aid of the revolution, their attempts
to secure a
quid pro quo.
But he does not put these dealings on the same
level as the British. The book therefore represents on the philosophical
side a period of transition for Malraux.
By the time he is writing
Man's D estiny,
his position has been so clarified
that he is able to turn the final years of the struggle into a novel. What
had to remain a mere journal' before, now is under an equal compulsion
to transform itself into a novel. His now clarified understanding of
Communism, especially of the Chinese Communists, who have by now
escaped bourgeois mi9Conceptions, obligates an order in his material, sets
up the craving to round out his own experiences, to increase their essential
veracity by an escape from the circumstantial limitations of a diary into
a medium capable of the form he now sees implicit in the very disorders
of the revolution itself. By adopting the method of fiction, he is permitted
to give, unimpeded by the mere facts of his daily observations, the repre–
sentations of every native reaction to the revolutionary situation. The
temperament of the anarchist, who, made reckless by consistent poverty,
out of perversity seeb his own death in the death of his enemy, is superbly
presented through an attempt to blow up Kai-Shek's automobile. The
indifference of bourgeois leaders and their German generals to human
suffering, their rugged individualism, their imperviousness to a social out-
